Amazon Will Acquire Twitch For $970 Million

Twitch, a video-streaming site for live gameplay, announced Monday it has agreed to be acquired by e-commerce giant Amazon for $970 million in cash. Earlier reports said YouTube was acquiring Twitch for $1 billion.

"The moment we launched, we knew we had stumbled across something special," Twitch CEO Emmett Shear wrote in a letter announcing the acquisition. "But what followed surprised us as much as anyone else, and the impact it’s had on both the community and us has been truly profound."

Since its inception, the streaming platform has experienced phenomenal growth. In July, Twitch streamed more than 15 billion minutes to 55 million visitors. It's become the streaming platform of choice for most gaming conferences and tournaments. Twitch also scored a major victory when it was integrated into the new PlayStation 4 and Xbox One game consoles.

A side project that spun out of general-purpose live-streaming service Justin.tv, Twitch has always been a growth driver for the company—so much so that the parent company was renamed Twitch Interactive in February. Coming full circle, Twitch shut down Justin.tv earlier this month.